Vitalik Buterin: I am pro Hard Fork in an actually political and economic sense, they are better than soft forks.
Lex Fridman: I think it is a beautiful principle as stated that a soft fork may be more coercive than hard fork. This is not just about cryptocurrencies. It is about politics in life. And, is fascinating. So, you are okay with hard forks. In fact, you think hard fork is the right way to make changes because then everybody is forced to make a decision. Do you accept this change or not as opposed to ideas being sneaked behind the doors and the decision is forced on you.
Vitalik Buterin: Exactly Yes.
Hard Fork some people say this is when they talk about Ethereum is that you are trying to upgrade an airplane while it is fine.
Vitalik Buterin: And, I think Soft Forks are also upgrading an airplane when it is fine. There is definitely some truth to that. There is definitely a bit more risk of a split as a result of hard fork than and as a result of a soft fork.
And, a split is highly undesirable right. Well, it depends, if it is a split because of a bug than it is verbal. If it is a split as a result of political differences, then I think a split is better than you know one side being forced to basically just like suck it up and accept the majority position even if one really hates it.
Lex Fridman: There is also political connections throughout the history of the United States. It is like sometimes groups of people strongly disagree with each other – should be forced to work it out. Even when a split seems to be an easy thing in the short term.
Vitalik Buterin: It depends for blockchains in particular, the costs of people being able to peacefully go off and do their own thing and you know if you have a country and you have two groups then, often enough fighting out the news roles then it requires lot of costs, in a blockchain they are lower.
Lex Fridman: So, if you were to look at the way things worked out at the block size wars and there was a split, whether it is Bitcoin Cash (BCH) whether it is like you putting out your history in that and you mention like Dan Carlin. If Dan Carlin wants to do an episode on the block size wars do you think it could have turned out better? Are you okay with the way it turned out?
Vitalik Buterin: I am definitely disappointed with what happened with the big block fight. I think that the source of my disappointment is that one of the things that you notice just looking at this political disagreements generally especially when you have environments where you know there are authoritarian that are like and single party dominated, and there is some opposition party and the opposition often has genuine grievances, but at the same time, the opposition often enough just sucks. It just doesn’t have the political capacity. It doesn’t have viability to come out with polity because its entire culture is like designed around resisting much more than it is designed around actually debated serious polity tradeoffs. And, I unfortunately think that Bitcoin Cash ended up being a victim of this
First, there was a split of Bitcoin Cash. Then of course Craig Wright came in and you know Craig Wright was this basically a scammer who just keeps pretending that he is Satoshi Nakamoto the inventor of Bitcoin.
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